Ubuntu Cloud not ready for mass market

I had two blade centres that I wanted to run virtualization on. Then it was timely that Ubuntu released their 11.04 version, cloud ready.

I read myself up on the Cloud controller, Cluster controller and the Node controller and started installing.

The first problem was when I did a PXE boot for the Node Controller. During the setup, the Node Controller contacts the Cluster Controller and the PXE server value is overwritten with the Cluster controller IP. The network configuration stopped further OS installation. I mounted the CD through the ILO management on the server instead, worked like a charm.

But the process of handling the images is not straight through. To setup a new image, you either need to do command line and remember IDs of the different images, or pay for the Landscape service.

I spent quite an amount of time to get the Ubuntu Cloud up and running, but dropped it and installed VMWare ESXi instead since I already used it for several years.